Bathrooms are frequently prone to having noxious odors. The use of the conventional toilet lends itself to odors of feces and urine being circulated throughout the bathroom. This is true even though the conventional toilet has water therein into which liquid and solid wastes are deposited. If the bathroom does not have an adequate ventilating system, these odors remain in the room and are often distributed to adjacent rooms when the bathroom door is open.
Most of these odors originate in the bowl of the conventional water toilet or water closet into which liquid and solid wastes are deposited and are later flushed away by water stored in a water storage tank.
Therefore, the art contains several designs for systems and devices for removing such odors. For example, the art contains systems which includes a fan-driven exhaust system connected to the bowl of the toilet or to the seat of a toilet. The exhaust system draws odorous air from the toilet bowl when the toilet is in use. The odorous air may be passed through a conduit and exhausted from the building, or it may be passed through a filter or purifying assembly and recirculated.
While somewhat successful, these devices and systems all suffer certain drawbacks which inhibit the full commercial success thereof.
The principal drawback with these devices is associated with the starting and stopping thereof. The known exhaust systems are all activated and stopped by one of three methods, to wit: manual activation and de-activation, as by a manual switch that is operated before and after toilet use; timed operation which is initiated either manually or automatically upon the occurrence of an event such as lowering the toilet seat; or automatic activation and de-activation upon the occurrence of a physical event such as weight being applied to the toilet seat (for activating the system) or weight being removed from the toilet seat (for de-activation).
All of these system-control occurrences require some physical action which may be only vaguely related to the actual condition for which the system is to be used. Thus, each of these actions really only implies the existence of odorous air, not the actual presence of such air. Such implied control may cause activation prior to actual generation of such noxious odors and/or cause de-activation either long before such odors are dissipated, or long after such odors are no longer present. In any case, the system may be operating when it is not needed, or not operating when it is needed.
Not only can this be inefficient and potentially ineffective, it may also be Wasteful of energy and may create unnecessary noise. Since noise is a form of environmental pollution, such prior systems may, in effect, merely be substituting one form of environmental pollution for another in a manner that does not reduce the noise pollution to the minimum required to effectively remove the odorous air from the bathroom.
Accordingly, there is a need for a toilet ventilation system which is condition specific in its operation and which will automatically activate only when needed, and which will automatically de-activate when it is no longer needed.